


Audible Distress

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 22:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11678820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Pelna can't sleep, ever. The city's loud and hard, but Nyx is determined to swoop in with softness and silence.





	Audible Distress

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghostl0rd (ahatfullofoctarine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahatfullofoctarine/gifts).



> happy birthday, charles! as is in keeping with this tradition of dropping fic like a payload on days of societal significance, here is your obligatory pelnyx domesticity to mark this momentous occasion

Nyx had met very few people more deserving of a seaside cottage retreat than Pelna Khara. Acclimating to city life had been hard on every immigrant coming in from the outer territories, but as he watched Pelna dig the heels of his palms into his eyes and whine over his coffee cup at five in the morning, he thought it was entirely possible that Pelna had it the worst.

Some of them took to Insomnia quicker than others, but no less hard. Crowe, for one, took one year to get used to the ceaseless crawl of traffic bleeding through the streets. As opposed to the three, up to five, up to never that the rest of them did. Crowe was born with chaos in her veins so, she and the city were kindred spirits in that sense. Always alive, loud, too big to belong to the rest of the world.

Nyx remembered the adjustment period for himself being a long, torturous, toeing the line of dangerous process. For both him and Libs. They carried the same ghosts with them over the bridge into Insomnia. They were like a chain between the two of them, cuffing them together so they tripped and trampled each other damn well near to death trying to survive the guilt. It took more than one year, trying to model themselves after Crowe’s determination to own the city, before the two of them were able to help each other abandon their vices and pull themselves up into men their dead families would be proud of.

Most of them didn’t like the city, but they got used to it. They had to. There was nowhere else to go.

It took living with Pelna for Nyx to realize that, while the rest of them had settled a long time ago, Pelna never had.

“Noise,” Pelna groused when Nyx asked what was wrong that morning. “Always. So much damn noise.”

It got to the point where Nyx didn’t even hear it anymore, but he remembered the early nights of lying awake, staring at a water-stained ceiling until the sun filtered in through the Wall. He remembered that he didn’t sleep for three days straight when he first entered the city, and that the ensuing panic attack at the end of the third day finally exhausted him so much that it forced him to close his eyes and stop listening to the city static. All he could hear was the blood rushing in his ears, anyway.

Pelna wore earplugs at night, an accessory Nyx had teased him about when they first moved in together, mocking offense that his boyfriend had the nerve to assume Nyx snored. Pelna had laughed, teased him back, and the conversation set off from there as they orbited each other’s nightly routines. It wasn’t until a few weeks into their new living arrangements that Nyx realized just how pivotal the little foam nuggets were to helping Pelna sleep. And even then, they didn’t seem to help much.

He was a restless sleeper, always tossing and turning and never able to settle into a spot comfortable enough – until the revelation of being smooshed up against Nyx’s back was bestowed upon them both during Pelna’s half-conscious experimentation. But even that couldn’t seem to quiet him completely.

The earplugs never seemed to block out enough sound. Pelna was always digging them even deeper into his head. The deeper he pushed, the more they hurt, sometimes leaving tiny scabs inside his ears so that they ached too badly to even use the plugs without rubbing against the miniscule wounds. If it wasn’t noise, it was pain that kept Pelna awake.

Maybe an hour, lucky if he got two of actual sleep. Which was a hopeless amount to survive the time he took on within the Glaive. Pelna had always been a night owl. More often than not, Nyx had thrown a farewell into the tech room well towards midnight on his own way home. Some mornings, he came back in to find Pelna slumped over his work table, in the same spot he’d left him, unconscious with a blueprint pulled over his head like a blanket.

Nyx was starting to think that the most sleep Pelna ever got was when he never went home. Headquarters was dark and it was quiet and it was tucked deep into thick walls that blocked out all of the noise that kept him awake. Staying bent over a work bench might have been the only way he got any sleep, but it was a disaster on his back.

On the days where he dragged himself from the work room to paw lamely at the cheap coffee, it was hard to watch him straighten his crooked spine into parade rest when Drautos corralled them all into line for the daily proceedings. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t get a decent sleep without some area of his body suffering from it.

His pain brought Nyx pain. Pelna never stopped working. He took the graveyard shifts, filled in for absent members on leave, didn’t take vacation days, and ran himself as hard as the machines he was often tinkering with before sending them off for approval from the tech overseers.

Pelna always looked tired, but Nyx never knew just how much until he tried sleeping next to him. Or watched his ordinarily beaming smile instead scowl sourly down into his cup of caffeine. He was not a morning person – but who really was, honestly. Nyx couldn’t blame him for the clipped words and sunken shuffle and lack of eye contact when he remembered how badly such little sleep could fuck up a person.

“You’ve tried everything, huh?” he asked much later, when it was just the two of them left at Mal’s Hut, stealing potato fries off of Pelna’s plate.

“You don’t think that, in all the years I’ve been here, I haven’t exhausted the options?” Pelna groaned, head in his arms on the table, as if he planned on falling asleep right there – Nyx wouldn’t put it past him, although this deep into the Galahdian district was even louder than the traffic outside of his apartment.

“You need a fresh perspective,” Nyx suggested, chewing thoughtfully on his pillaged piece of potato.

“I need soundproof walls,” he protested, pulling his hands through his hair and bumping his head against the table, repeatedly.

“A mild concussion might do the trick.” Nyx’s eyes bounced up and down along the route Pelna’s skull took to the table. “That, or I could just put you in a choke-hold until you pass out before bed.”

“Real kinky, Ulric. I wanna _sleep_ , not be put into an induced coma.”

He groaned again, keening like a neglected child as he sat back up. A red mark faded from his forehead and the dark circles beneath his eyes looked even deeper and darker every time Nyx failed to come up with a solution that might help him sleep. Comfort, he could provide: a firm arm around his waist, clean-enough sheets, doubling up on pillow purchases; he offered once to close the window to reduce the noise pollution, but the apartment was so damn stuffy that they were breathing less than they were sleeping. It all came down to what Pelna put in his ears to stop the sound.

He’d tried every brand and material from here to Shiva’s asscrack, but they were never good enough. Either he still heard the city or they scratched his ears or they were just useless in every way. He’d tried cotton balls, he’d tried wax, and he’d even tried headphones when he was at his most desperate, but the plastic apparatus never survived his flopping limbs during the sole hour he was in a totally unconscious state.

Pelna sighed, resigned to his fate of dying young from sleep deprivation – he was pretty sure that was a thing, and even if it wasn’t, he was going to be the first case.

A yawn crackled over the secure frequency in their earpieces, then. “Is one of you coming to relieve me soon?” Crowe asked, and they could hear the creaky stretch of her limbs as much as in her voice as in actuality. She yawned again, refuting her next descriptor. “I’ll give you this thrilling stand and stare gig free of charge. Don’t even have to trade for it.”

For a man operating on not-even the bare minimum requirement of sleep, Pelna was quick as a coeurl, pressing the device in his ear. “Would you keep the stand and give me the stare?”

“Packaged deal, sorry not sorry. Going once…”

“I’ll be there in ten,” Pelna said, despite Nyx’s slanted glare. “Think Yama still brews coffee this late?”

Nyx pinched the bridge of his nose and refrained from saying what he was thinking. That if Pelna needed sleep so bad, he should have let Nyx take Crowe’s post for the night and go back home. Maybe if he got an early start, he could score a whole of _three_ hours of sleep as opposed to the two. But the man was a lost cause and so was his sleep schedule, he figured. Which was why he could say nothing that would be listened to as Pelna gestured to the owner and asked for coffee in their native tongue.

“Don’t wait up,” Pelna murmured in parting when he had his coffee to go, slapping a kiss to Nyx’s cheek before spiriting off towards the Citadel.

Nyx drummed his fingers against the rough wood of the table, considering the deep splits and rusting heads of the screws keeping it together. He needed Pelna to sleep. The flailing and shifting and wrapping around him like a midgardsormr, Nyx could take. He wasn’t the most stationary of sleepers himself. It was the animal grunts and plaintive whines for the sweet embrace of death that he couldn’t handle anymore.

He tapped at his earpiece, considering catching Crowe on her private channel to coerce her into steering Pelna back home if he would take her place instead. He tapped it again, hesitating. Then clicked it off and dropped it onto the table, glaring at it by association with the ear-based products that were tearing up his boyfriend’s ear canals.

He stared at the little device for a good long time before his head tilted to the side. Brow creasing with an idea, he picked the piece back up and balanced it between his fingers. He gave it a very stern warning.

“Don’t make me look like a dumbass.”

* * *

Pelna was skeptical, but too weary and hopeless not to indulge Nyx, especially when he was so adamant that it was going to help. When he looked at him like that, with such steely edged determination and the pout of a twelve-year-old on his lips, Pelna couldn’t deny him anything.

So, he didn’t let his chest seize up in a panic when Nyx said he _stole_ the spare earpieces from the supply lockers. He didn’t let himself run panic scenarios through his head to imagine _how_ he got into the supply lockers, given they were sealed tight with industrial-strength, fingerprint-approved scan locks (who’s hand did he dismember to gain access?) No, no, Pelna didn’t imagine all the ways Nyx could have possibly doomed himself to a court martial for stealing restricted, thousand-dollar instruments for his recreational use.

Instead, he put the familiar shape of the devices into each ear and touched the tiny button Nyx had instructed him to. Instantly, his head was filled with the sounds of seagulls and coastal tides. The gentle churn and crash of salt water on sand.

Pelna pitched an exhausted look at Nyx’s victorious grin. He’d tried this new age, meditation crap a million times before. Stealing from the royal security office was not worth another failed endeavor. Nyx ignored him and dragged him to bed, tucking him into the beaten mattress and fluffing his pillows and setting the window open just right to catch the little evening air they needed to breathe for the night. Then, he settled next to him, left his back open for Pelna to inevitably sprawl across at some point during his endless meandering around the bed, and settled down for sleep.

Pelna sighed, looking forlornly at the ceiling and expecting the usual. For sleep to never fully come. Just creep into the fringes of his consciousness and catch him in that halfway place of delirium that wasn’t quite sleep, but wasn’t quite awake, either. He was so busy brooding between the monotonous tones of the ocean that he didn’t even realize that he… _slept._

One second, he was hating this dumb, noisy city and all its midnight car horns and trash cans collapsing and dogs barking and engines rumbling. The next second, the sun was out, the waves lapped gently in his ears, he didn’t feel a single scrape past the comforting familiarity of the earpiece, and Nyx was beaming down at him like some kind of sensory god in the golden dawn rays.

“I love you,” he said, too loudly to hear his own voice over the closed off noises.

“Yeah, I know.”


End file.
